


Let's Find The Good We Knew Before

by kyanve



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Pidge and Keith conspiracy buddies, platonic fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 19:23:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12087708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyanve/pseuds/kyanve
Summary: By dumb coincidence, Katie ends up witness to Keith’s exit from the Garrison before she’s prepared her identity as Pidge, and decides to get involved.





	Let's Find The Good We Knew Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mikiri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikiri/gifts).



> Gift fic for the wonderful Mikiri, who has put in a lot of time and energy for this fandom and is a wonderful person!
> 
>  
> 
> (Title is from Jupiter by Cruxshadows)

It was a moment of chance and late-night restlessness.

She’d gotten a hotel room in town the night after getting thrown out, and then just stayed there. It took a while to work out enough fake paperwork to get in, after all, and she couldn’t really go home for that without getting in a world of trouble. 

And maybe she was keeping stupid hours; she’d had a hard time sleeping with everything that was going on. 

Sitting out on a ledge when she had nothing better to be doing watching the Garrison and working on the equipment she’d been building to mimic their setup for picking up signals further out was a perfectly valid way to waste time when she couldn’t sleep. The elevation helped with checking for clear signals with less interference, after all.

She wasn’t expecting having a view of the compound to actually result in anything, but maybe a week after she’d been thrown out, there was some other commotion with light explosives that seemed to be more meant for light and noise than actual damage, a bunch of the lights going out, and somebody going over the wall and running. 

That got her curiosity, and she stuffed her computer and equipment back in her bag in a hurry, running off to track where the other figure was heading - she knew the ledges and the possible hiding spots there okay of late, and she wanted to know what was going on that had someone doing an obviously planned and sudden exit.

Sticking to high ground made it a little easier to keep track, long enough to pick out where the hiding places would be and just head for those when she lost sight; there were alarms going up, so they’d have aerial drones and be searching the area soon, keeping running wouldn’t be an option.

At first she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it right as she got up into the narrower little crevices of the bluffs. She couldn’t afford to stay in the open either now, with the hum of engines from the aerial drones already starting in the background.

It was dark and she was fumbling with a small keychain flashlight that caught a flash of gleaming eyes back in the dark.

She covered her mouth to stifle a yelp, taking a couple steps back with the light flailing wildly in the dark; the two points were weirdly high up and - 

It was a human-shaped shadow in the dark with eyes that gleamed like some kind of animal’s. 

“Turn that off!”

She blinked, reaching down distractedly to click the light off, leaving her with nothing more than starlight and moonlight to see by, mostly cut off by the bluff they were partway inside. Whoever it was didn’t seem to have a problem navigating in the dark.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to get rid of her only source of light when she was stuck in a small space with some unfamiliar guy who’d just been blowing things up in the Garrison, but there was something vaguely familiar about the voice that she couldn’t place, and she didn’t want to risk attracting the search parties, either. 

Iverson would probably assume she’d been in on whatever he just did.

“Who are you, what are you doing here?!”

“Hiding from the Garrison, right now,” she shot back. 

There was a weirdly awkward pause as she was pretty sure she was being stared at. “Why are _you_ hiding from the Garrison?”

Well, there probably wasn’t any way it could get worse. “Because Iverson kicked me out and if I get caught here with you, he’d probably assume I was in on whatever you just did.” 

The dark blur back in the cave leaned back a little, as if sizing her up; it was almost irritating how much he didn’t seem bothered by the dark.

“How did you get kicked out?” 

It probably wasn’t something she should be talking about to random strangers, but hell, the guy had just pulled _some_ kind of massive stunt on the Garrison.

“I broke into Iverson’s office to break into his computer. What were you just doing?” She folded her arms, waiting. 

He shuffled his feet awkwardly. “Stealing server blades.” 

Now her curiosity was up. “…So did you pull it off?”

“Maybe.” 

Paranoid. Of course. Who wouldn’t be, hiding in a narrow crevice in a desert bluff with the Garrison trying to hunt them down? 

There was awkward silence for a few minutes, and she was pretty sure she was getting sized up again.

“So what were you after on Iverson’s computer?” The shadow shrank with some scuffing noise on the rock as he sat down in the crevice; she wasn’t going anywhere herself, not with the occasional engine-and-propeller hum outside, so she settled where she was, setting her backpack on the ground next to her. 

This was probably some kind of new level of don’t talk to strangers, even if she did have the weird feeling she’d heard his voice before. 

“…I dunno, what were you after stealing server blades?”

She could see the shift as he hunched his shoulders, probably glaring at her before the sullen response. “They’re hiding something and I need to find out what.” 

“So you’ve probably got a pretty good decryption setup back wherever you’re going with those.” 

It wasn’t even meant as a jab, it was an actual assumption thinking out loud - why would someone steal parts of the Garrison’s servers if they couldn’t get into it?

So it was a little bit of a surprise when he paused, awkwardly silent, and then there was the quiet sound and barely visible movement of a facepalm. 

That was enough for her to start plotting. She was already in trouble and planning some pretty energy-intensive and highly illegal shenanigans to get what she was after, why not bargain for a minion?

“You can’t get them decrypted, can you.” 

He hunched further where he was sitting.

“…How about this. I’m after something they’re hiding too, and I could use some backup. I decrypt and get into what you stole, and you help me find out what they’re hiding that I’m after. Deal?” 

There was more sullen sulk. “…Fine. Deal.” 

She had a minion, and one who was apparently pretty handy with improvised explosives. “While I’m at it - any chance any of what you stole would have anything on the Kerberos mission?” 

There was a sudden, sharp shift, and she was pretty sure she was getting stared at again, but he was being weirdly quiet. 

“…Two of them _should_ , the other three I stole as decoys.” 

He’d dropped quiet, shifting uncomfortably, and she squinted in the dark.

“Why are you investigating that?”, she asked.

That… was actually a faint growl, and it was getting mentally attached to the way his eyes had reflected her keychain flashlight earlier and how easily he was handling the near-pitch dark of the crevice as Things that were Somehow Not Right. 

She leaned over, hands resting on the rock beside her. “Look, my family was on that ship. I need to find out what happened, and I know they’re hiding something. Why are you trying to steal their servers on Kerberos?” 

“To get Shiro back.” He’d curled back against the rock.

That pulled the nags together - she’d only heard his voice in bare snatches in passing on the Garrison…

And a few times in the background of calls home from Matt.

“You’re that cadet that was hanging around him all the time - Matt mentioned you a few times.” Shiro’s weird antisocial friend who lived alone in the desert despite being one of the top cadets, that had been wary of Matt even. She knew there’d been a name there, even if it took a few minutes to fish it out of her memory of Matt’s stories. “…Keith?” 

There was an awkward shift on the stone from where he was sitting. 

So maybe not exactly a minion.

She stared at the dark mass that was the far wall, the silence hanging thick in the crevice.

“…My name’s Katie. Katie Holt. Shiro’s roommate was my brother, and the commander of the mission was my father.” And at this point, they were pretty even on how far involved they were. “They both used to tell stories about Shiro all the time.” 

“…Shiro’s all I have.” 

It was quiet, barely audible in the dark. She pulled her knees up to her chest; they’d be stuck there for a while until the Garrison drones left. “So I didn’t get much off Iverson’s computer when I got in there, but… everything from the probes out that way was missing from the normal archives and shifted somewhere higher security. There were a couple images from afterwards on a few different days…the ship was just - sitting there, landed right where it should’ve been, as if they’d just left it.” 

There was another quiet, rattling growl and a hissed, faint “I knew it.” 

“If you got the right server blades, you might have the missing images.” 

“I damn well hope so,” he muttered. 

There was another long silence while he didn’t seem inclined to talk much and she was mulling over this new development. The Garrison apparently hadn’t told him anything different from what they’d told her, and he’d come to the same conclusion that something was fishy about the way they’d presented everything. 

He had storage from one of their backup servers and couldn’t get into it; she couldn’t get to their data, but could break in if she had access. 

She’d also been running around in the desert for a few hours, now, even if it was dark out and comfortably cool compared to the daytime heat; she fished in her backpack for a water bottle, pausing as she fumbled with the catch on the top. “Uh… water?” 

“I brought my own.” 

She stared at the dark blur where she could only just make out outlines and the basic shapes of clothing, shrugged, and took a drink.

A half-minute after, he was rifling through a bag at his feet and holding over some kind of small plastic bag that she could sort-of identify as jerky or smoked meat of some kind in the dark; he’d set what was probably another one in his lap.

“ - Thanks.” She accepted it, settling to pull it open. “I didn’t think I’d be out here that long, so I kind of … didn’t bring food.” 

“They won’t give up for a while; we’re probably stuck here until dawn.” 

“Yay,” she grumbled, with flat sarcasm. He was probably right, too.

It was definitely mesquite-smoked meat rather than jerky, probably pork, although it tasted a bit odd - richer than what she was used to. “So what is this?” She held up the bag, squinting at it in the dark.

“Javelina I brought down last week.” He was very matter-of-fact about it, as if it were a normal routine; most of what she remembered about the wild pigs was warnings to stay far away from them if she saw them. 

“So that’s how you get by out there? Hunting and stuff?” It would’ve passed for something people sold in roadside stands, he had to have a clue what he was doing. 

“Yeah. When I’ve got more time, sometimes I’ll sell bones and hides or feathers at farmer’s markets, or take up odd jobs with the ranchers and farmers on breaks.” 

The Garrison’s top-ranked cadet pilot, and he was spending his off-time living like some modern attempt at an old-west drifter. She almost asked about if there was anybody he stayed with, but after the way he’d said Shiro was all he had, and the time Matt had mentioned Shiro staying in the desert instead of catching his flight home over a holiday break…

“Well, you’re probably a better cook than I am. I’ve burned canned ravioli before.” 

Keith gave a noise that didn’t manage to exist enough to be a half-laugh. “Shiro’s not much better. He tried to live off boxed macaroni and cheese for a month once.” 

“God, Matt told me about that - he started checking to make sure Shiro’d eaten and that it was real food after that.” She started to laugh, and then talking about Matt crashed into why they were both out there, with makeshift backpacks, sitting in a dark crevice, and she spent a few minutes staring at the bits of smoked meat in her hand in the dark.

Keith had apparently hit about the same; she was the first one to end up breaking the sudden silence and gloom that descended. 

“You’re still in the Garrison, right? I mean, unless they ID you for this one?”

“Yeah.”

“So… I’m working on getting back in, but I can’t really go home until then, because I’m working on getting a fake identity to sneak back, and Mom would hit the roof, so I’m staying in hotels… and I can probably manage it, but. Uh.” Somehow staying in the middle of nowhere in the desert felt like it’d be safer for the kind of shit they were up to than staying in hotels that were easily traceable right in town. 

“You need a place to stay.” 

“…Yeah. And I mean, it’d make it easier to work on the servers and stuff while I get it together, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about hotel maids getting suspicious or Iverson realizing I’m still in town.” 

There was a long, quiet pause. “Sure. Why not. I think I’ve got spare sleeping bags or something. Just don’t sleep next to the wood stove.”

“It spits sparks?”

“No. Jack gets in and sleeps under it sometimes.” 

She stared at him in the dark. It was a weird way to talk about an apparent pet. “What is Jack?”

“Rattlesnake. He lives under the shed. He doesn’t really bother anything as long as you give him space.” His tone was more fitting to a neighbor’s cat getting in the yard chasing birds. 

Not a pet. 

The staring continued, and she was starting to think that maybe he’d been out in the desert by himself a little too long. 

“Right. Watch out for Jack.” She curled awkwardly around her water bottle and the bits of smoked meat. “You do have internet out there right?” 

Probably an important question about a shack in the middle of the desert.

He gave a faint snort. “Hijacked satellite signal with a VPN and a few redirects.”

“Cool.” At least she’d have that to work with; probably better security than what she could kludge around the hotels right there. “I can probably do some work on the security, make sure nothing can get in.” 

“Probably better than what I’ve got.” 

Things went quiet again for a while as they ate, and the time was starting to catch up on her; she caught herself yawning and nodding off. It was starting to hit uncomfortably cold, too, and she was regretting the shorts that’d been an okay-ish idea earlier.

“…I’ve - got a blanket.” 

It was a very awkward statement from Keith as he was holding it up, and the reason for the awkward was pretty quickly apparent.

Blanket, singular, and while it was big enough, it also wasn’t incredibly huge.

The mutual awkward stare lasted for a minute before pragmatism won over on her end. “Oh, whatever.” She picked up her backpack and the now mostly empty baggy of smoked meat and shuffled over to flop against him, ignoring the sudden stiffen of alarm and confusion as he froze. 

A couple seconds passed with him frozen, and then she reached up to tug the blanket down, because damnit, it was getting _cold_ out there, she was tired, and she’d just committed to sharing probably not a lot of space with Shiro’s weird adopted desert rat Western Drifter Wannabe anyway, and if Matt and Shiro were _that_ okay with him, he was probably safe.

He did drape the blanket over them, although it took a few minutes for him to go from awkwardly frozen to awkwardly shifting to try to accommodate her decision to sleep against him.

She woke up to sunlight starting to creep across the crevice, and Keith having shifted somewhere in the night to curl around her, face smushed against her shoulder and a few teethmarks in her coat. 

****************************

She’d gotten settled into the shack while he went back to the Garrison to pretend nothing happened. There were a couple days in peace and quiet with nothing more to worry about than working more on her fake identity and messing with some of his equipment to see what she could mesh with hers to get better signals and get into more, and start on decrypting the server blades. 

He drug back in the evening of the third day, walking in and falling over on the couch as if he’d forgotten there was someone else there.

“…I take it things didn’t go well?” 

His first reaction was to flinch and jerk sitting up, half-drawing the knife on his belt, staring at her for a couple seconds in confusion before recognition set in. The knife went back in its sheath and he flopped back with his face on folded arms. “I missed a camera.” 

“Ouch.” She winced in sympathy. 

“You’re pretty calm about it.”

“It sucks, but it’s not going to stop us.” She was barely looking up from her laptop.

“We’ve got no eyes on them and no way to get anyone past the atmosphere if we do find something now.” 

She kind of was curious exactly what he was planning on doing if he hadn’t gotten kicked out; long-range spacecraft took launch crews and weren’t exactly things you just stole. “Not for another week.” 

He stared at her.

“Katie Holt was expelled and banned. Pidge Gunderson is a mid-session transfer with excellent grades in good standing.” She grinned wolfishly.

That got a mouthed “oh” and him awkwardly watching her work on her computer.

“Also I managed to hook up some of my equipment to some of your antennas and stuff and bounce a few things through to hijack some incoming signal from further out, and I found something that’s going to sound crazy, but…”

She fussed with the laptop, turning up the volume; there was white noise as she messed with frequencies, white noise that turned to something harsh and mechanical that sounded like random noise, then ran through a couple layers of decryption to something that gradually turned into voices.

Voices that sounded wrong for human, in an unfamiliar language.

She looked up, serious and still, waiting for some kind of comment from him and entirely expecting even the obvious evidence to get called fake somehow. “Now I know how unbelievable this probably sounds, but I think there might be an alien presence in the solar system.” 

Keith stared at her at that, and then narrowed his eyes at the laptop, shrinking down into his arms more with distinct discomfort. 

Then he buried his face further in the bedding, and there was a louder growl that definitely didn’t sound like it should be coming from a human.

He was doing his own freeze, not looking up.

“…Wait - you - the thing with your eyes -” And she’d noticed he lived mostly off meat, and made spectacular faces when she’d questioned that. “… _How?!_ ”

“I don’t know.” His voice was muffled into the blanket. “I really don’t know.” 

“Uh.” She blinked, staring at him. “…Holy shit.” She stared for another minute; this was probably not the best way to react to finding out the guy you’d just teamed up with was an alien, or part alien, or something not human or not entirely human, especially when he seemed to be acting like he expected her to blow up or something, but she wasn’t sure what one _was_ supposed to do with that. “Okay, so you’re an alien. Or part alien. Or something.” She paused again. “…Uh. Wow.” 

There was silence, and Keith shifted, just enough for one purplish-grey eye to peer over his arm.

It occurred to her that it really wasn’t an entirely natural shade for humans, either, now that she thought about it. 

“So. Uh. I take it that if you. Don’t know how, then you prrrrobably don’t know anything about them?” She was still blinking widely, and hadn’t moved since the realization hit. 

“No.” He was staying sullenly still.

She blinked again a few times. “…Wait so you can see in the dark and you’ve apparently got a tapetum lucidum but most creatures that’re nocturnal have really different color vision ranges, so are you like, partly colorblind or something?” 

It was his turn to blink in confusion; he finally shifted to look up at her properly, although it was with a bewildered and vaguely disturbed expression. “I - what? I mean I can see red and stuff just fine, I’m not a dog.” 

“Huh. I mean the tapetum helps gather light, but usually there’s at least weighting towards more receptors for wavelengths that’re easier to pick out at night, or like, receptors for ultraviolet wavelengths since those are still pretty visible…” She leaned forward, squinting at his eyes, and he leaned back, eyes wide, flattening against the back of the ragged couch that functioned as a makeshift bed. 

“Uh.” He stayed flat, not sure what to do with this at all. “I - kind of? I don’t - look, people have never believed me about that and it’s not like I have words for those colors anyway?”

“DUDE YOU CAN SEE ULTRAVIOLET! That’s so cool!” She somehow managed to slide out from under the laptop without jostling it to have her hands on the edge of the couch, leaning in while he shrank into it, almost flopped over in defeated confusion with the mental equivalent of a blue screen of death written across his face. “So does that mean the reason you avoid greens is being like, mostly a carnivore or something? I mean I can’t blame you a lot of them are kind of gross, can you eat chocolate? I know it’s poisonous to a lot of things - man I wonder how that even happened, you’d think there’d be way too much genetic disparity between a nocturnal carnivore and humans for it to work -”

Keith managed a tiny, weak hand gesture to tone it down, shrinking back into the couch and half-wishing he could just vanish into it. 

She stayed where she was for a moment, processing, then pulled back from the couch, back to her laptop. “Sorry about that. I mean it’s just - dude, you’re _an alien_. Or part alien. Or something.” 

“Yeah.” He was relaxing from pressing against the couch, but the one word was listless, and he’d gone flat, half-boneless, one arm dangling off the edge of the couch.

And now that the initial shock and novelty was starting to settle, it was sinking in that she’d probably hit nerves, and that there were probably a list of reasons why it wasn’t actually a great thing to be living with. “…Sorry. I guess I kind of got carried away there.”

“It’s fine. Better reaction than I usually get when people notice any of the weird crap.” 

“Right. So…” She picked her laptop back up, settling with it with the back of her head resting against the couch cushion. “I only just figured out how to get that signal decrypted enough to get bits; I need to see about finding some language algorithms to see if I can figure out what they’re saying - and I’ve almost gotten into the Garrison server parts you stole to see what they have, too.” She messed with another few bits of programs and scripts to monitor and go between them, something to start recording software on the alien signal when it was active. “I don’t know how much getting back in will help, but it should mean chances to get at things we haven’t managed before.”

“I guess I’ll hold down the fort while you’re doing that, then.” He’d scooted a little closer to watch over her shoulder. “Maybe look into some of the old sites, see if there’s any clues I might have missed.” 

“Old sites?” She twisted her head to look up.

“Yeah, there’s some old ruins with paintings and stuff that’re odd. A few of them seem like they might mean something.” 

On the one hand, that sounded like a lot of hiking and being outdoors.

On the other hand, actually going out in the field to weird old ruins with possible evidence of aliens, even if something that old probably didn’t have a connection to what was going on. “When I’ve got open days you’ll take me with, right? I mean, an extra set of eyes can’t hurt.” 

Keith blinked a couple times. “Sure?”

“Cool. I’m gonna see if I can get a permanent monitoring station for their frequencies set up in here before I go back to the Garrison.”

*****************************

She first spotted Jack three days before she got back into the Garrison, when the snake was leaving the cool area under the shed to head out to rocks further away from the shack.

It didn’t take much to convince her to stick with the advice to give the snake a wide berth - the diamondback had to be close to six feet long.

Keith had settled into being used to her presence. He was quiet and not great at starting conversation, awkward when she started it, and didn’t like talking about himself; she started avoiding anything personal, sticking to astronomy and bits of science. He didn’t follow a lot of the computer work, but could keep up fine with astronomy and some chatter about ships and the bike. 

Old sci-fi was iffy - sometimes he’d keep up fine, sometimes he’d go quiet and distant and wilt sadly, and after a few times of it falling flat, she remembered that Matt and Shiro had obscure in-jokes; he probably knew most of it from Shiro. 

The most she ever managed to get him talking at once was when she’d been asking a few idle questions while she worked about the survival setup he had; he knew a surprising amount about the area, the wildlife, the local ecosystem, and how to live off it, kludged from experience and magpie-gathering online from survivalists and bits of information on older cultures in the nearby deserts and other ones. He had a lot of random photos of wildlife, landscapes, and plants.

There was less poison oak in the desert, but biting insects were a thing, the sun was insane, and it still wasn’t really her bag, but it was one of the few things he seemed actually happy with, so she kept that to herself. 

The first weekend after she got back into the Garrison, she took advantage of the chance to leave to head back out; Keith had brought the hoverbike into town, and they met at one of the fast food stops, sitting out on the sandy clay hill outside with a couple of hamburgers. 

The next morning, she woke up to Keith walking out of the shack in a trance; he got about twenty yards away from it before there was any sign he was even aware of her trying to get his attention. 

Even when he stopped and looked down, he still seemed dazed, having a hard time focusing on her and not some point on the horizon.

She caught his wrist, tugging back. “Whoah there, what’s gotten into you?”

“I don’t know.” He stared off at the horizon with a distant frown. “I had this… weird dream and it’s like there’s something I have to go find.” 

“Well, you’re not getting very far like that.” 

He wrinkled his nose. “…Yeah. I’m going to get some water and the bike, see if I can follow it.”

They made it a few hours out with Keith not feeling any closer to his mysterious goal before they turned back, declaring it time to plan for a longer trip. There wasn’t enough time in the weekend for a trip to any of the ruins sites he’d mentioned, either, so she spent part of the time focusing on turning his radio and bits of kludged computer into a monitoring device for the alien frequencies. 

That night, they stayed up in the shack with venison and some cooked cactus leaves, along with a campfire-tin popcorn pan Pidge had snagged from the grocery store in town. (She had yet to accept the roasted grasshoppers and cicadas he had a habit of munching on.)

Keith had photos from the ruins - good ones. That turned out to be another surprise; he actually had put time into his camera equipment. The cameras themselves - a mirrorless with a few lenses and a small video action-camera with a shoulder mount made to be almost indestructible - were apparently the result of scrounging and splurging what money he came into, while the bags and some of the other gear was secondhand and salvage. 

The temperature had dropped, and they were curled up both on the couch, sharing the handful of blankets he had, going through photos on a slightly battered tablet he kept. 

“It’s possible that a similar figure’s showing up in these three different sites because of the story getting passed along by people traveling or trade - it’s not like we’ve got great knowledge of the neolithic cultures here, but…” 

He had an entire roll of old, crude and stylized paintings and a couple rough carvings of some kind of shark-person. “None of them are dramatic, they’re all just … depictions of some kind of random meeting without much happening that doesn’t seem to have a point. Most mythologies there’s more to go on for symbols or some clue what it’s supposed to convey.” 

She yawned. “Probably worth looking into. I mean, besides that rig and getting the language decoded, we don’t have a lot else to go on.” 

“How’s that been going?” He nodded toward the unholy thing his radio setup was turning into. 

“Pretty well actually? Your equipment’s a little old and patchwork, but it worked pretty well for building a stable terminal. I’ve got it recording anything with those frequencies it picks up, I just need to get a translation working.” She sank back into the blanket, couch, and his shoulder. “Which is going to be the hard part, since it’s going to have to be purely theoretical structural linguistics, and that means I’m swiping other people’s code because that is _so_ not my field.” 

“I can’t help much with that either.” He was idly flipping back and forth through some of the photos from the few old ruin sites; they were intermixed with some landscapes and some of the plant life around the area, along with an occasional lizard, snake, spider, or deer. “You’re way ahead of me on all of this - I’m not sure what I’d even be doing right now by myself.” 

“I dunno, you seem like you’ve got a lot of the rest of it together. I mean, I think I would’ve been spending my breaks in hotels living off takeout, and you’re ahead of me on the alien stuff.” She shifted a hand under the blanket at the tablet.

He rolled his eyes with a muffled groan. “God, you have no idea what that took. Most of _everything_ to do with it is idiots making up nonsense for attention, or rambling occult theory, or people you kind of worry about who probably need to see someone about adjusting their meds.” He shifted, squirming something loose. “All I really had to go on was my medical records and this.”

He shifted his knife out of the blankets, setting the tablet aside and unwrapping it. 

The marking on it wasn’t anything she recognized, and it glowed slightly when his hand was on the hilt, dimming out when he moved it to let the knife rest on his knees.

“I’m not even sure what it’s made out of - it doesn’t trip metal detectors. I used to sneak it around between placements and on airplanes hidden in a stuffed animal.” There were volumes not actually said out loud there. It was definitely a very functional blade, and of course it’d be considered alarming for a kid in the foster system to be carrying a weapon like that around. “It’s… all I have left of my parents.” 

She studied it quietly; he’d had it the whole time, but she’d never seen it unwrapped, and he’d never drawn attention to it, something that was probably old habit by now. 

“And they weren’t around long enough to tell you anything.” It was quiet and her making an observation; it was easy enough to tell - she wasn’t sure he would’ve said anything yet if he’d known, but it had been obvious enough that he was confused about it. 

He shook his head. “I never knew my mother, and my father vanished when I was pretty little. He’d disappear for days at a time anyway, I’d gotten so used to it that it took over a week for people to realize I was in the house by myself. I knew it was important, but he didn’t tell me what it meant before he was gone.” 

There was a tinge of bitterness to it, and she was starting to wish Matt had somehow managed to talk him into coming with them for the holidays the last year or two before Kerberos.

It was almost boggling to think of growing up without that; she’d thought she’d taken them for granted when they’d disappeared, but this was an entirely different tier. 

“You know, when we get them back…”

When, not if. She wasn’t allowing that if.

“If you want - you could probably stay with us sometimes? I mean, I know Matt probably mentioned it before, but Mom and Dad would probably be glad to have you. They’re all a bunch of nerds and scientists, and they’d be happy to help you figure out anything we haven’t found by then.” 

Keith stared at the knife distantly for a long minute, frowning faintly, then closed his eyes and let out a breath with a small nod. “I mean, I’m not sure I’d know what to do with it. I’m pretty good out here, but.” 

“You’re helping get them back - once we find them, I know Mom and Dad wouldn’t forget that.” She gave his wrist a squeeze under the blankets, and he gave another small nod with a weak, almost confused smile.

“So… does it do the glowing thing when anybody touches it?” She knew she’d seen the marking on it glow when he was holding the hilt.

He blinked, taking a second to shift gears. “No? I mean, I don’t think so. Shiro’s held it a few times and it never did that for him.” 

She wormed a hand loose of the blankets and looked to him for permission, waiting until he nodded to it to reach over tentatively and put her hand around the hilt. 

The weird rune on it stayed dark. For an alien weapon of unknown material, it wasn’t as strange as she’d almost expected; it felt about like holding any other sword or dagger she’d gotten to touch at faires and shows or shops. “Weird. Do you think it’s reacting to the alien thing somehow?” 

There wasn’t any sign of mechanisms or circuitry, but they also didn’t know what it was made out of; there were touch-reactive materials and it wasn’t that hard to make biometric-reactive systems that didn’t look like anything.

“Probably.” He shrugged. She pulled her hand back under the blankets; she was curious about the blade itself, but she’d also seen him using the knife to carve up something he’d brought back from hunting, and knew better than to put a finger anywhere near the edge. 

There was quiet, then he started re-wrapping it in thoughtful silence. As he was finishing, there were occasional glances at the radio monster.

“…Do you think…” He trailed off, staring at the radio while holding the knife, and looked down. “Nevermind, it’s nothing.”

“That doesn’t sound like nothing.” She could almost visually track his train of thought from that. “Look, if whatever your mother was the same race as whatever grabbed them - that doesn’t mean you’re one of _them_ them, alright?” 

She pointedly wormed to be leaning more on him, just to punctuate that. “You grew up here, you’re also human, and you’re trying to save them. Besides, history may not be my subject as much, but there’s usually been people willing to go against their own to help others anyway, and I’m sure it’s the same for them. Maybe your family were runaways or something.” 

Keith stayed quiet, slipping the knife under one of the pillows on the old couch. “I guess you’re right.” 

She wrapped around one of his arms, all the more intent on punctuating it. After the nearly two weeks of close quarters trying to work on this and figuring out how much he hadn’t had that she wouldn’t have dreamed of being absent, how much was going on where he was used to covering things bothering him and hiding things, it was like she’d ended up adopting a second older brother.

Matt had joked about it before, Shiro was practically adopted into the family, so really, it was just finally managing what probably should’ve always been there.

Even if it was in the context of part of the family being missing. They’d get them back, together. 

After a while, they both dozed off, curled up in a pile in the blankets.


End file.
